Below
is an interview with Ono Toshihiro, artist/writer of the Dengeki
Pikachu manga. The interview originally appeared in
Animerica
Volume 8 #1 and on Animerica's
website. Below is a combination of the two interviews, since
both were basically the same with a few questions that the other
interview
didn't have. This interview contains a lot of neat information
about
how manga is produced in Japan, as well as what goes on in the mind of
the person responsible for one of the most popular manga versions of
Pocket
Monsters ever.

Please
not that this interview was translated and printed for an American
audience.
So the American names are used to replace the Japanese ones.
Also,
his name (Ono Toshihiro) is written in its American form of first
name-family
name, so now it's Toshihiro Ono.

“How do I start?”
said Toshihiro
Ono, at his San Diego Comic-Con panel in August 1999. “Thanks for
coming. All these people. I have no ideas what questions
you’ll
ask me. I’m kind of nervous.”

Artist of Dengeki
Pikachu,
the Pokémon comic series released in the U.S. as The
Electric Tale of Pikachu, Pikachu Shocks Back!, Electric
Pikachu Boogaloo, and Surf’s Up, Pikachu, Ono
began
drawing comics in elementary and junior-high school. “Especially
when studying for tests,” he said. “I’d scribble in the margins
of
my notebook.” He never had any official training as an artist,
but
he did his dues in a bachelor’s tiny four-and-a-half tatami-mat
room (with no bath and a shared toilet) in Tokyo, drawing illustrations
for advertisements for ad agencies, columns in men’s magazines, and
English
dictionaries.

“You don’t need a
license
to be a manga artist,” he says. “If you call yourself one, that’s
what you are. Of course, getting work is a different
matter.”
Along his freelance jobs, Ono worked as an assistant to other artists,
including Glass no Kamen (“Mask of Glass”) artist Suzue
Miuchi,
for several years. “I learned the basics from people who knew
what
they were doing better than I did,” Ono said. “There are many
manga
schools in Japan, but I never went to one. If you want to learn
manga,
the best way to go about it is definitely to become someone’s assistant
and learn the techniques on the job. The best way to learn is to
look at drafts produced by pros. They’ll feed you as an assistant
and also pay you. Two birds with one stone.” Ono’s comics
before Pokémon
included game-based manga such as Zelda and Bar-Code
Fighter, based on the Bar-Code Battlers game; Kôkakukishin
Yadogari-kun (“Armored Machine-God Yadogari”), an original
manga
in which a robot called Yadogari teams up with a boy to fight evil
shark
people; and Neppitsu! Manga Gakuen (“Hot
Pen!
Manga School”), a manga how-to book.

But nothing could
have prepared
Ono for the success of his Pokémon comics.
At
Comic-Con, Ono signed autographs for hours past his initial signing
period,
autographing hats, cards, comics, even a custom Pikachu-shaped
motorcycle
helmet. His panel was jam-packed with preteens eager to ask the
artist
their questions about the series. When asked how he felt about Pokémon’s
success in the U.S., Ono laughed. “It’s a very complex
feeling.
I never in my life imagined it would be such a huge success here.”

ANIMERICA:
How
did you get started in Pokémon?

ONO:Pokémon
started out first as a game for the Game Boy. I first started
drawing Electric
Pikachu when the editor, Mr. Saito, asked me if I would try
drawing
a couple of episodes of the manga to go along with the anime.
This
was before the anime even started. I’d always loved the theme of
“a boy’s travels,” and the only Pokémon manga
around
at the time were simple gag and four-panel comics. I thought that
if it were taken seriously, it could be really cool. This was
before
the anime started up but while Pokémon the game
was
still getting more and more popular. When I look at it now, I
laugh
because I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. The manga
started
about a month before the anime did, but I didn’t think then that it
would
last so long.

ANIMERICA:
Could
you describe how the Pokémon comic is
produced?
For example, how do you draw stories about TV episodes and characters
that
haven’t come out yet?

ONO:
First I
get the script of the anime show, and then I change the story to meet
the
number of pages the manga needs to be. After that, just like
everything
else. [LAUGHS] For Pokémon that are hard to imagine
in 3D, I look at a figure as I go. Unfortunately, right now I’m
writing
the last episode of Dengeki Pikachu. The Orange
Island
story line will be the end of the manga. I wish I had the chance
to involve Gary more and make him go on journeys with Ash. I also
wanted to draw Lugia (not yet named in English), who appears in the Gold
and Silver versions of the game and in the second
movie.
I love the idea of mysterious creatures lurking at the bottom of the
sea
(sea serpents and the Loch Ness monster, etc.), and I want to draw
Lugia
as a character with that kind of mysterical quality.

ANIMERICA:
Why
does the manga skip around the way it does? It jumps ahead in the
episodes, from Episode 1 to 5 to about 10 to about 30.

ONO:
The animation
airs weekly in Japan. KORO KORO COMIC SPECIAL, which carries Dengeki
Pikachu, is published only every other month, so I have to
select
manga episodes to write based on the animation episodes that will air
within
two weeks of KORO KORO’s publication date. So even if there is a
TV episode I want to draw, I can’t always draw it if it doesn’t match
the
date of the magazine well enough. That’s also why they aren’t
drawn
in order.

ANIMERICA:
Are
there many restrictions on your work for the Pokémon
comic? For example, have you ever hard to make changes because
what
you did wasn’t the same as the game or the TV series?

ONO:
They check
the content of the manga an awful lot and often tell me to make
changes.
[LAUGHS] Sometimes what they say doesn’t make sense, but there’s
nothing I can do about it. But even if I draw the manga exactly
the
same as the script, I often notice when watching the anime that the
story
changed somewhere along the line. Also, manga and TV animation
are
different mediums, so the amount of information conveyed is also
different.
It’s natural for certain expressions not to match.

ANIMERICA:
What
was your favorite episode of the comic?

ONO:
The third
episode, "Clefairy Tale" (from Electric Tale of Pikachu).
I'm embarrassed that I can't say why, but I really liked that one.

ANIMERICA:
Did
you find any one episode more difficult than the others?

ONO:
Not really,
but when the tenth episode "Subway Pipi" ("Clefairy in Space" in the
U.S.)
was being put into book form I had to redraw many of the pages, which
took
a lot of time. Also, Dragonite appears in the last episode, and it was
pretty hard to get a face that cute to look powerful.

ANIMERICA:
What’s
the hardest thing about drawing the Pokémon manga?

ONO:
It’s hard
to draw the central Pokémon with any sense of realism.
Before
starting on the manga, I bought a hamster to use as a model for
Pikachu,
but it died, and I didn’t want to do that to another one, so now I just
go to the pet store to look at them.

ANIMERICA:
Do
you have any advice for fans who want to draw Pokémon (the
monsters,
rather than the comics)?

ONO:
Circles.
Pokémon are essentially circular, so if you can arrange the
parts
of their faces inside of the circle and attach the limbs right, they'll
look cute. If you're drawing a Pokémon that is based on a real
animal,
it might help to use that as a reference while you draw.

ANIMERICA:
What
are your favorite characters to draw, either human or Pokémon?

ONO:
Ditto,
because it’s easy to draw. [LAUGHS] Ash—I want to go on a
trip
with Misty, just like him (and forget about job, rent, etc.)!
Oddish,
because it’s cute.

ANIMERICA:
You
did a manga adaptation of Pokémon: The First Movie.
Were you working on this before the movie came out?

ONO:
That movie
came out in July of '98, and I received the scripts and continuity in
April.
I wrote the manga at the end of May.

ANIMERICA:
You
said you did a manga adaptation of the Pokémon
movie.
Were you working on this before the movie came out? How does your
manga version compare to the finished film?

ONO:
At first
I was told to draw Mewtwo’s birth, which wasn’t included in the movie,
so I made a manga out of the first half of the movie, centering on the
meeting of Mewtwo and the professor (until the part where Ash heads to
Mewtwo’s island). But after that the anime staff wrote an
original
“Birth of Mewtwo” episode that was produced, so there’s not much
connection
between the manga and the movie.

ANIMERICA:
Have
you every played the Pokémon game? Did you
catch
them all?

ONO:
I played
the game when I was starting to draw the manga. I wasn’t that
interested
at first, but then I really loved it! I got totally into
it.
[LAUGHS] I never did catch them all, though. Games like
that
are the enemy of work for manga artists. I had to put it down in
the middle.

ANIMERICA:
What’s
your next project?

ONO:
There’s
a new manga I’m beginning right now for KORO KORO. I’m drawing a Magic:
The Gathering manga based on the American novel. It looks
like there will be a lot more hard fighting in it than Pokémon
has. I prefer more easy-going types of manga, though, so I think
I won’t make this one very bloody.

ANIMERICA:
Are
you also a fan of American comics? What American artists do you
particularly
like and why?

ONO:
I like
American comics because the art and stories have such a different
flavor
from that of Japanese comics. There was a group of us called CLA
that was an American-comics appreciation group, and one of our
bulletins
was once printed in America. I drew a picture of Supergirl for
that
bulletin. Recently, I also contributed an illustration to the
Japanese
version of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.

I like Walter
Simonson (The
Mighty Thor) and Mike Mignola—I don’t know many new
artists.
I usually pay attention to the art first (because I can’t read
English),
and these artists match my taste in drawings. I used to copy
Simonson
a lot.

ANIMERICA:
Did
you buy a lot at the convention? What did you get?

ONO:
I bought
lots of original pages—probably too many. [LAUGHS]
Especially
lots of Chis Bacchalo’s original pages from the beginning of Generation
X.

ANIMERICA:
What
do you think of America and the convention? What do you think of
American fans?

ONO:
When I
was signing autographs in San Diego [at the convention], I was
surprised
at how many adults there were, even though it’s the same in
Japan.
I was amazed at what a powerful force Pikachu is. [LAUGHS]

There is a huge
comic event
in Japan called Comic Market (400,000 people over three days).
The
San Diego convention was so relaxed compared to this that I had a
really
good time. [LAUGHS] I also got Mike Mignola and Bill
Sienkiewicz
(Elektra: Assassin) to draw Pikachu. [LAUGHS]
It didn’t seem to me that American and Japanese fans were all that
different.
People passing time by playing mahjongg while waiting for videos to
screen
make a big impression on me.

ANIMERICA:
Do
you have a message for your American fans?

ONO:
I’m the
kind of guy who loves road movies, and when I think of “journey,” I
think
of America’s wilderness and those roads that stretch all the way to the
horizon, so I’m very happy for my manga to be appreciated here. I
would like to see people use Pokémon as a
starting
point for reading more Japanese manga.

ANIMERICA:
Could
you please write a very short description of yourself?

Birthdate:
27 February, 1965Birthplace:
“I was born in Nagoya City, in Aichi Prefecture, but we moved when I
was
one-year-old to Chiryuu City, in Aichi.”Blood
Type: AStar
Sign: PiscesMartial
Status: Single

Which is the
strongest
Pokémon?Mewtwo or Mew would
be the
strongest.

How do
Pokémon
stay in Poké Balls?I think you have to
ask
Professor Oak how that works.

How do
Pokémon
reproduce?It’s one of the big
secrets
of the Pokémon world.

What color are
Brock’s
eyes?I think they’re
brown.
That’s the feeling I get.

Why does Ash
keep winning
with the same Pokémon he already has?I’d have to say it’s
Ash’s
courage and guts behind it, and his battle strategy, and every time
they
grow a little and become better fighters.

Did Misty ever
get her
bike back?No, she hasn’t
because it’s
a rather expensive one, and someday, when she’s grown up, Ash will make
enough money to pay her back.

Will there
ever be a romance
between Ash and Misty?I personally think
that
Misty is looking more for having an older brother, but my editor is
always
nagging me that a little love-interest story might be interesting, so
it
may happen.

Will Ash ever
have a Pokémon
match with Gary?Those two are
lifelong rivals.
I think they’ll continue to fight against each other without ever
deciding
who’s better.